No Turning Back
by Melancholic Marshmallow
Summary: Trillian finally discovers what she's been missing all of these years, but far too late. Oneshot, one-sided Trillian/Arthur


**Title:** No Turning Back  
**Series:**The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Book 6 of 3 - And Another Thing)  
**Genre:** Gen  
**Rating:** K+  
**Summary: **Trillian finally discovers what she's been missing all of these years, but far too late. Oneshot, one-sided Trillian/Arthur  
**Disclaimer:**The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and its characters are the intellectual property of Douglas Adams. And Another Thing is the intellectual property of Eoin Colfer. No profit was made from the creation of this fanfiction.  
**Author's Note:**I never usually 'ship Trillian/Arthur, but when Trillian said this certain line in And Another Thing, I just knew it called for a fanfiction to be written. Constructive criticism please.

No Turning Back

She was hopelessly clueless as to why she had said it. Trillian's words hung heavily in the room of dazzling azure sky like a dense, ominous fog. They thickened the atmosphere sickeningly, Trillian almost gagging out of regret and surprise, as if suffocating on smoke. She stood choked and dumbstruck, the imprint of her words swirling nauseatingly through her mind. It hadn't meant anything, nor had the moment called for it. She had simply said it on the spur of impulse; a remark formed in an instant with neither care nor deliberation and spat out in aggravation. Just as quickly as the words had been born into her mind they had gone, escaped from between her lips and fled. There was no chance of taking them back, not now, not ever.

_"I chose Zaphod at the party, so live with it and drop that torch you're carrying." _

Trillian found it absurd, laughable, even, that the man at whom those now irretrievable words had been directed showed no sign of concern, nor of even having registered the remark at all, yet Trillian herself was blown back, smashed into by an ineffable tidal wave of raw emotion. As the waves subsided, a sudden, bitter realisation began to steadily grow clearer, grow larger, become infinitely more defined, like a buried shell having its layers of obscuring sand washed away by the pull of the surf.

It had been years, so many long years since then. Granted, a significant proportion of the time she had spent had only just revealed itself to have been nothing more than an artificial dream, but to Trillian this trivial fact did not lessen the impact in the slightest. Her long life, both in reality and construct, had been filled with excitement and wonder. She had achieved things most people could only ever dream of achieving. She had hurtled across time and space, zipping across centuries and back again in mere hours, risking life and limb for her career and daring to tread where few sane people would ever have the courage. She had played a role in rescuing whole worlds, had the honour to have gazed upon so many of the galaxy's most remarkably breath-taking and humbling sights. She had experienced adventure like nothing she could ever have experienced on Earth. Ultimately, she had gotten her wish. A mysterious man from beyond the stars had granted her most impossible desire, whisking her away to the deepest reaches of the unknown, saving her from her fate of living an inevitably dull and unfulfilled existence on the same mundane little planet until her day's end.

Trillian knew that she should have been absolutely joyous about this wonderfully improbable turn of events. She knew she should have been grateful for having received such a thrilling opportunity, for having found refuge away from the planet just weeks before the whole of humanity and its vast and great history was reduced to nothing more than shards of rock and rubble. But through all of the wonderful things she had experienced, Trillian had not been able to escape the ominous ache of regret lurking in the shadows deep within her chest - an ache that gradually grew and spread through her entire being, becoming more painful as time passed, until ultimately Trillian had come to curse the very day that she had ever departed from her home world with that pitiful excuse of a galactic president. She yearned for a different life. Where and when were technicalities - anything other than her present existence would have been highly palatable. She began to wish that she had never had left Earth - even if it had meant being killed along with the rest of her kind. To Trillian, even such a bitter fate as that would have now seemed a more preferable alternative. It would still have been another life, albeit cut tragically short. She had fought to distract herself, tried to find happiness in whichever way she could. She threw herself wholeheartedly into her career, and bought her daughter into the world, who only grew up to be just as unhappy as her mother was. Nothing could quell the empty throbbing sensation. It was like a huge, gaping hole from which something crucial to her happiness was missing, if only Trillian could have figured out what it was.

But now her own words had sparked something inside of her, something which had been obscured for so long down in the darkness, lying dormant and waiting to be unearthed all this time. The final layers of sand were buffeted away by the waves, and at long last ancient, hidden feelings finally came into the warmth of the sunlight. As Trillian gazed upon the weary looking man ahead of her who was nodding feebly and feigning understanding as his distraught daughter rambled to him about flaybooz and husbands, she finally understood what it was that had drawn her to say those seemingly hollow words. It occurred to her that maybe the one thing she had regretted most in her life was not simply having left with a man at the party, but having left with the wrong one. When she had left with Zaphod, Trillian could not help but feel that she had thrown away a great opportunity in exchange for the one she now wholly regretted. It would not have been a particularly exciting opportunity - much more sedate than the one she had opted for when she had abandoned Earth in a spaceship. It would have been exactly the kind of existence that at the time she had been so desperate to escape from - a linear life spent working a boring job for mediocre pay, living with the same average man in the same dull house until the day their short lives finally burnt out. At the time Trillian had hated the idea that life had to be so seemingly monotonous, but thinking about it now with a new, enlightened perspective, Trillian thought that maybe such stability wouldn't have been such a bad thing after all. She had always wanted a family. That had been the very reason she had given birth to Random, and a proper family was exactly what Random had been deprived of, left to suffer perpetually alone in day care whilst her mother leapt across time and space to cover wars.

Trillian pondered the now faded possibilities wistfully. Scenes of what could have been floated through her mind - her and Arthur living together, raising Random. In union as the thing Trillian had wished for, and what Random had been desperate for - a proper family. A quiet life of tea and sentimentality, with no meandering through space, chasing the dream of finally finding a home. A sense of truly belonging somewhere.

But it was far too late now. A slightly sad, bitter sweet smile played on Trillian's face. Maybe, she thought, it was she who at long last needed to decide to live with it, and time for her to finally extinguish her own torch, once and for all. After all, there was no turning back.


End file.
